Might sound a bit of a silly question. I see people talking about threat models, and privacy guides which say things like “if this is part of your threat model, do X Y Z”. I’m just not sure if it’s a general “this is what I want to protect myself against” or if there’s more to it.
As an example, the Fediverse and Lemmy, like the whole public internet, are scraped for all possible reasons.
There are many levels of objections to this behavior. Some may choose to remove comments after a given amount of time, although that is rather pointless. Any company can setup an instance and use the initial synchronization of federated instances to capture all data.
Some people might simply avoid sharing any personal information that can dox them or correlate them with other profiles.
Then there are people like myself. I do not really care about how this account is correlated. I am only here for the human social connectedness. I object to all collection of personal data and view the trade of such data as digital slavery and a gross violation of fundamental human rights.
My personal threat model is that I avoid any potential situation where my dwell time, and page views are monitored and used to manipulate and exploit me. I’m particularly concerned with how the best and brightest psychology majors have been getting into social media and marketing jobs. I noticed a pattern of how I was motivated to make frivolous purchases over time when I engaged with corporate media sources. I have never responded to ads directly, but when I shopped on a platform, suddenly I encountered more content relative to that platform. After many projects I started asking myself why I chose to do x/y/z, and it was usually due to some suggested content I had watched.
Around the time I came to Lemmy, I disconnected from all corporate social media. I won’t even run most apps if they are connected to the internet. I do most stuff in a browser only. I separate social media from any shopping. I also run a whitelist firewall for most of my devices.
I am protecting myself from any viewer retention algorithms that might directly or indirectly use the human propensity for masochistic negative attraction and attachment. I found this damaging on platforms like FB in the first years of my physical disability a decade ago.
So one might say, my actionable threat model is direct manipulation based concerns.